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Friday, November 11, 2016

Let's Read: The Once and Future King (Ch.7)

It begins with Merlyn’s thoughts on what it
means to be a properly educated individual.

“Nobody got scholarships like they used to
when he [Merlyn] was a boy, and all of the public schools had been forced to
lower their standards” (56).

So… there is public schools in this version
of the middle ages? I know for a fact that the idea of public school as we
think of it today didn’t emerge until sometime, I believe, in the eighteenth
century, and that was for boys only; in the middle ages, universities didn’t
emerge until the verge of the Renaissance. So it is weird to see that in
White’s version there is a public school system, and once which has apparently
been around long enough to warrant discussion on the supposed lowering of
standards.

Then comes a far too long section talking
about jousting, or “tilting.” There is a weird moment in the narration where
Lancelot and Tristram are described as good jousters, which is weird because
neither of them have been announced in the narrative so far as of yet.

“The best place for hitting people was on the
very crest of the tilting helm, that is, if the person in question was vain
enough to have a large metal crest in whose folds and ornaments the point would
find a ready lodging” (57).

What a playful swipe! White here appears to
be having some fun at literature’s expense; in Arthurian tales of the later
period and onwards, we see a number of texts which have knights ornately
dressed for combat. Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight as well as the later Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene feature knights with elaborate sets of armor
hinting at a bit gaudy orientation.

Think back to all the armor you’ve seen in
various high fantasy texts. Think of all the curves and twisting horns enmeshed
in wave-like patterns of metal… think of how impractical it must be, and how
expensive such a piece of show armor is, to not only own that suit but use it
on quests. This is what White is taking aim at and it is needed, though not
something that has helped reduce the number of surreal armored suits.

But… Wart and Merlyn discuss knights and
what Wart wants to be when he grows up. Wart says that he would like to be a
knight errant, had his parents been of nobler birth (assuming his parents were
around to begin with, that is). There is a bit of a back and forth involving
this as well as Kay and his training; Wart feels depressed at having to train
for something which he can’t really do and is better suited for Kay.

“The trouble with the Norman aristocracy is
that they are games-mad, that is what it is, games-mad” (59).

Coolio. So we know have a definite temporal
localization.

The Norman Invasion was what unseated the
Anglo-Saxon rulers after their own invasion following the collapse of the Roman
Empire. After this early eleventh century invasion, England is more or less
divided between Norman rulers who hail from France and some sort of local body
of Anglo-Saxon rulers who function as a kind of puppet government for the now
conquered England.

At any rate, I am unsure of how the
historical Norman rulers viewed games. I vaguely remember something about the
Normans enjoying games, but maybe that is just a false memory prompted by this
book. Who knows. Point is we have a real time and place—England, sometime after
1066.

Things get interesting though when Merlyn
talks with Wart about his future occupation. AS I remarked previously, Wart
said that he would have liked to be a knight, and if that was a possibility
then he would call himself The Black Knight, have a “splendid” suit of armor
and never do anything but joust and go on quests. Can you tell that Wart is
written as the archetypical boy?

Then Merlyn says this, however.

“’Your
wife will scarcely enjoy the life’

‘Oh,
I am not going to have a wife. I think they are stupid.’

‘I shall have a lady-love, though,’ added the
future knight uncomfortably, ‘so that I can wear her favour in my helm, and do
deeds in her honor’” (60).

Girls are icky—ew!

Can you tell that Wart is a little boy?

But, no, I love this section because the
homoeroticism deepens. This hinges on the inclusion of the word ‘uncomfortably’
and the reluctant inclusion of retaining this purely platonic ‘lady-love’ as
part of what a knight must to in order to be a knight; in other words, the
lady-love is all part of the job. Mandatory heterosexuality works in weird
ways, yes?

Sadly, this train of thought is not
continued and instead Merlyn assents to Warts pleading to find a jousting
match. Merlyn teleports them to a field where they meet King Pellinore, again.
They encounter Sir Grummore Grummursum (hereafter referred to as Grum-grum).
After a series of “hails” and “how-de-do”, which I feel is supposed to be a
satire on formal etiquette since the characters repeat this formality so much
and in a very blundering manner, we get onto the jousting match. King Pellinore
battles grum-grum.

It is all very boring.

This scene goes on for too long and I
honestly didn’t see the point of it. I think White was trying to defamilarize the
idea of knightly combat by problematizing just how difficult fighting in a full
suit of armor would be for participants today—reminding the contemporary reader
that knights were not the elegant death machines which we think of them today,
but rather, a bit clunky and cumbersome when they went about their business.

But, each mindlessly hammers one another
and the battle concludes without a definite winner; each knight is depicted in
a very immature practice: Pellinore and Grum-grum read like feuding brothers.
After assuring Wart that neither of the combatants are seriously wounded, and
will, in fact, be the best of friends when they awake, Merlyn whisks Wart back
to the castle.

All in all, this was by far the most
yawn-inducing chapter in the book thus far. Hopefully such lengthy scenes are
not described very much in the future. If they are, I shall throw myself from
the closest cliff rather than suffer yet another stuffy lecture.